Sharon Stockton
Agency, Inscription, and Bodies of Depth:
Rape and Technology in Twentieth-Century Literature
My airplane runs on its wheels, skates along, and then
up again in flight! [...] Continue the massacre...!
Watch me! I seize the stick and glide smoothly down...
See the furious coitus of war, gigantic vulva stirred
by the friction of courage, shapeless vulva that
spreads to offer itself to the terrific spasm of final
victory... ! I raise my sights to a hundred meters...!
Ready...! Fire!
--Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, 1909
Marinetti's encouragement to war depends upon traditional as well
as distinctly twentieth-century constructions of the subject.
Clearly, subjectivity here is synonymous with masculinity, and
agency is predicated on the projection of that subjectivity out of
and by way of the body. The passive recipient of this harsh gift
reciprocally validates the projecting agent through a spectacular
transformation from formlessness to order. This is an old story:
the object-woman is emptied of subjectivity in order that she
might be brought to life--or to meaning, value, or order--through
the violence of masculine inscription. As Jean-Joseph Goux
expresses it, what woman is said to bring to creation in Western
mythologies is "matter"--mater, raw material, open space; what man
brings to creation--to the violent moment of his own identity
formation--is form, the power to give order, meaning, and value to
matter (213). The subject of violence "is always, by definition,
masculine; 'man' is by definition the subject of culture and of
any social act" (de Lauretis 43). Thus, as Higgins and Silver
argue, violence against Woman is the context for Western identity
formation, and rape is the metaphor of choice in figuring this
establishment of agency.
What is distinctly twentieth century about Marinetti's revision of
the old story is its attempt to conscript the machine into the
services of the idealistically phallic subject, and what is
covered over is the scent of vulnerability which hangs about that
powerful seat astride the flying machine; technological mastery is
a two-edged blade. When we look at other modernist writers--D. H.
Lawrence, for example--we see that prosthesis turn on its master,
metamorphosed into a corporate industrial body forever outside of
human control. The Lawrentian protagonist finds himself curtailed,
castrated--feminized. As in much fiction of the twentieth century
generally, Lawrence's master narratives and manifestoes give way
to micronarratives and renegade action, and the sovereign subject
becomes the pirate rapist in a world where gender distinctions
blur and shift and where aency is thus reduced to the unsteady
reinscription of masculinity on a hard technological body which
has inexplicably become feminine. In this way, Lawrence foresees
the ironic project of masculine, "high," postmodern fiction, a
genre structurally marked by the paradoxical conjunction of lost
sovereignty and attempted rape (ironic rape, parodied rape,
symbolic or metaphorical rape, failure to rape, cyber-rape, etc.).
Nicholson Baker's heavily ironic The Fermata is a classic example.
In this novel, rape is rescripted in a particularly postmodern
fashion as renegade human action on the sterile and lifeless
corporate body of late capitalism. Displaced by technology, the
masculine protagonist also depends upon the technological nature
of things to open--literally, playfully, monstrously--a space for
himself on the otherwise slick and unmarkable surface of his
world.
R. W. Flint and Earl Ingersoll have both pointed out that
Lawrence's attitude toward the machine was not entirely negative.
In spite of a little unease, for example, Lawrence admired
Marinetti greatly, and in spite of the usual Lawrentian mouthpiece
who heaps anathema on technology (e.g. Mellors in Lady
Chatterley's Lover), he nonetheless celebrates the machine when
its function is clearly phallic prosthesis. Ingersoll has pointed
out, for example, how central the motor-car is in the crucial
"Excurse" chapter of Women in Love (151). Here Ursula succumbs--in
a car--to Birkin's dark and "electric" force, acknowledging him as
a "son of God." This positive conjunction of man and machine is
typical in Lawrence; also typical is the turn away from the
traditional association of phallic power with (electric) light: in
Lawrence's fiction, the mastery of the machine is accomplished in
phallic/anal darkness and warmth. When man enters the (cold)
light, on the other hand, he makes himself vulnerable to a machine
that has metamorphosed into a nightmare of mechanic and feminized
proliferation.1 In Women in Love, the masculine victim is Gerald
Crich, son not of God but of an "industrial magnate," explicitly
characterized by Lawrence as technological master of feminized
nature. His is a world of light and visibility, and he tolerates
no fecund shadows. As "Deus ex Machina," Gerald does not partake
of Lawrence's dark imagery of primal masculine fertility but only
of the white light of technological production, and because this
is the case, he is vulnerable to the more powerful and more primal
light of that "other" machine.
The figurative castration and murder of the "industrial magnate"
is accomplished at the hands of the Magna Mater, "the mother and
substance of all life" (337). Gudrun Brangwen is associated
throughout Women in Love with frozen white power, an image that
refers simultaneously to the moon, thus eliciting the archetypally
feminine, as well as to technology in its most negative aspect
(Birkin's motor-car, framed positively, deifies man in darkness).
In either case, Gudrun's brilliant inner light prevents her body
from being the matter--the "vessel"--which can be filled with
Gerald's potency, thus identifying him as subject: even in the
midst of their violent sex, Gudrun is Gerald's "white flame," his
"snow-flower" of such moonlike power that, although "he had
subdued her," "her subjugation was to him an infinite chastity in
her, a virginity which he could never break, and which dominated
him as by a spell" (210). Thus although he rapes and throttles
her, she wins and he dies; although "it was his will to subjugate
Matter to his own ends," it is his fate to die in a "cradle of
snow" below an icy moon, "a painful brilliant thing that was
always there, unremitting, from which there was no escape" (464).
By the time Lawrence writes Lady Chatterley's Lover (11 years
later-1928) this empathy for the technologically castrated man has
all but disappeared; in Clifford Chatterley, Lawrence ridicules
the "generation of ladylike prigs with half a ball each" which has
been castrated by technological production--the war machinery, the
prostheses, the collieries of which type Clifford is lord, and the
"motor-cars and cinemas and aeroplanes [that] suck the last bit
out of [men]" (217). Clifford Chatterley is, in fact, almost a
cyborg; crippled and rendered impotent by the war, "his
manhood...dead," he is not only dependent on but a part of his
motorized wheelchair (290). Constance Chatterley is his wife and
extension, and as such she articulates the ambivalent relationship
of modernist man to technology: she is both phallic supplement,
cold white representative of the corporate machine, and she is
autonomous feminine body--sexually frigid (cold), brilliant and
hard in her corporate resistance to masculine interjection. Lady
Chatterley is not properly "frigid," of course; her "problem" is
rather that her orgasms are self-controlled, a pathological
condition which reduces man to "merely a tool" (8). Like the "evil
electric lights" and "diabolical rattlings of [the] engines" of
Tevershall pit, the woman's body ultimately dehumanizes man,
alienating him from his own productions and his own potency.
Mellors's rape of Lady Chatterley is a renegade attack on that
corporate industrial other.2 The violence within the narrative
thus constructs the subject position of "natural" man, a figure
who opens a new space on the cold and alienating--but ultimately
permeable--surface of industry. Bereft of the machine-as-phallic-
prosthesis, the modernist text produces the rapable machine--
technology as aestheticized object-victim, validating its
masculine "other" through its oddly conceived vulnerability. The
permeable machine serves the same function as does the feminine
body in Laura Tanner's argument; the rapable body is a "text on
which his [man's] will is inscribed, a form that bears the mark of
his subjectivity even as [the female/feminized victim] cannot
divorce it from her own" (115). In Lawrence, the violent signature
is as indelible as it is triumphant: Mellors's "will" and his
"mark" are not only printed on Constance's body and mind but are
embodied in the growing fetus. At the deep level of Lawrentian
psychology, even her most inner self has been accessed; she is
healed, redeemed, and alive--awakened to the life of the body. In
this way the rapist both energizes the mother body and brings its
proliferations under masculine control. With him Constance can "no
longer force her own conclusion"; she can "do nothing" but "wait,
wait, and moan in spirit as she felt him inside her withdrawing"
(133). The desiring, lacking womb not only identifies him as
sovereign individual but also allows him to "[fold] himself" in
"darkness" against that "malevolent Thing outside." Rape thus
defiantly inscribes masculine identity in the face of a seemingly
autogenetic technology, but only under cover of darkness; the
mindless and apocalyptic copulations of the machine grind on above
him, in the light of day (or of the moon).
For Lawrence, then, the force implicit in industrialized
production has become irreparably severed from the masculine
subject; the violence of sovereign personality is only marginally
redeemed through renegade action on that corporate body. In this
Lawrence forecasts the ironic gesture of high postmodernism: the
subject is presumed to be excluded from the technological forces
which constitute him; in the name of play, the subject perseveres
nonetheless in the violent reassertion of (masculinized) agency.
One might think here of cyberpunk's cowboys and sundogs; Barth's
computer generated goat-boy; Pynchon's rockets and coitions which
so neatly conspire. Here I shall take up Nicholson Baker's The
Fermata, a novel which provides a clear snapshot of the way
postmodern "literary" rape figuratively (and, of course,
ironically) carves a space for three-dimensional agency on the
flat surfaces of technology. The Fermata is a fantastical novel
about a male "temp" who has the ability to stop time on command,
using these "fold times" as opportunities to gaze into and act
upon the secret and private spaces of the female body. Not
explicitly about technology per se, the novel is also about
nothing else; it could only have been written in a scopophilic era
of fast-forward, pause, and play buttons-when voyeurism entails
the illusion of control.3
In many ways Arnold Strine exemplifies the postmodern subject to
perfection. By profession a "temp"--a temporary, generic, and
replaceable office worker of late capitalism--Arnold can most
easily be defined as a small and unlikable pocket of alienation in
a depthless world rushing at vertiginous speed. As with all of
Baker's character's, Arnold savors this floating position in the
sea of a proliferating commodity world; when he begins to feel
mired in permanence or enduring human connection, he switches
jobs. His marketable skill is transcription, transforming the
anonymous spoken word into the anonymous written document. Thus an
organic cog in the machine--a bit of flesh lodged between tape
recorder and computer--it is this small and exchangeable part
which nonetheless holds the power to stop the information machine
and burrow into its softening interior. As with Lawrence, however,
such renegade action is not directed against the actual forces of
corporate technology but rather against the c-aestheticized female
body. Arnold is aware of his options--the banks he could rob, the
havoc he could cause on mainframes--but uses his power only to
undress, gaze at, touch, and otherwise sexually intervene in the
lives of different women.
Structurally, The Fermata is framed by the narrator's
"relationship" with Joyce, his current supervisor. In the
narrative "now" of the text, then, Arnold fondles his frozen boss
(having already pulled her dress up over her waist, her nylons
down around her ankles), sneaks into her apartment and into her
consciousness, lets her in on his secret, and tells us the story
of his life. In this self defense, which takes up the bulk of the
text, the narrator's goal is to convince the reader that he is and
has been nothing but "harmless." It becomes increasingly clear,
however, that his scopophilic project entails actual power over
the women he--in effect--rapes. He tells his audience in the
beginning of his "autobiography" that watching the frozen bodies
in the fermata is not enough in itself. The voyeuristic gaze draws
ever closer to the frozen (or dead) female body, parting its
coverings in order to stare ever more deeply into its orifices. He
feels compelled to act on the observed body, so that he not only
watches a woman bathe and masturbate, for example, but also
ejaculates in her face, starting time again briefly so that she
feels that something is amiss. We are assured in such scenes that
all is well, all is harmless: actual penile penetration has not
occurred. Invisibility validates, and Baker's narrator has used
the invisible prosthesis of time control, ultimately a phallic
power in that it opens a space on the female body for masculine
signature.
The feminine object is thus not only stripped of subjectivity but
of organic life itself. It is precisely this necrophilic aura that
begins to make Arnold feel bereft of identity, and so he begins to
insinuate himself more and more often into unknown women's
consciousnesses. In one of his periods in the fold, for example,
he follows a woman from the library to her bus, then inserts a
vibrating butterfly into her vulva, "gradually increas[ing] its
flutter level...over a series of six or seven time-perversions"
until she has an orgasm, taking care to make eye contact with her
at this point. He hands her the vibrator in an envelope when they
reach her stop. The voyeur thus becomes the rapist in postmodern
retreat, engaging in what would under normal circumstances be
fantasy but with the aid of "technology" becomes here actual power
over the (feminine) world.
A huge part of the novel is given over to the pornography that
Arnold writes and slips obtrusively to women in fold time. In
fact, Arnold writes (his pornography and his autobiography) in the
fold as often as he plays with women's bodies; writing, like the
raping games--like the fantastical fold technology itself--offers
Arnold the illusion of a passive depth in
which his identity might become clear. Significantly, he then
buries his stories--at one point literally--where a woman will
find them, thus again replicating the three-dimensional depth of
the foldout. He watches her read the buried treasure (or listen to
it, in the case of taped pornography), and then follows her in
order to determine the effect he has had, hoping, of course, to
have aroused sexual interest. The evidence of his success--the
trace of his presence--is sexual response, evidencing his potency,
his penetrative power, his depthful restructuring of a slick
technological world from which--as in Lawrence--deep human
connection has been excluded. Unlike his temping jobs, then,
Arnold's "work" is the invasion and transformation of the frozen
body of woman through discourse; the open space and empty vessel--
that she is in his games enables him to think of himself not only
as a subject with effect but as writing subject, the master of
discourse who through the techne of scripture can liberate the
feminine body into health. As with Mellors, Arnold's figurative
rape not only validates masculine subjectivity but redeems the
feminine technobody by writing on it, planting something in it,
giving it "life": "the world is inert and statuesque until I touch
it and make it live" (13).
In the end, as in Lawrence, the machine turns on its master,
becoming the property of a female successor. Arnold remains
confident that his powers will return to him, but this is dubious:
the transference seems decisive. In short, his "technique" is
sucked out of him with a penis pump, transferred to a dildo, and
given to Joyce (Arnold's former boss and current lover). The
migrant techno-laborer of late capitalism--the "temp"-thus
achieves his final status as "Object-Woman," his body and
consciousness both rendered vulnerable to the rape of the machine,
to the gaze of some unnamed and unknown corporate other (Jardine
75).4 Just before he loses his powers, in fact, Mold finds himself
(enjoying being) a part of a scientific project to determine the
effect of masturbation and/or writing on carpal tunnel syndrome.
Mold is placed inside the "vaginal" core of a superconducting
magnet, his penis is painted with reference points, and he is shot
through with x-rays while his masturbation is observed by powerful
women in white coats. The emotional drive of the scene is derived
from the sense of control Arnold maintains, unaware of his
ludicrously extreme vulnerability. He has moved full circle from
voyeur to exhibitionist, and it is his body which is treated as
object, shot through with the invisible bullets of twentieth
century technology.
In her well known "Cyborg Manifesto," Donna Haraway suggests that,
in spite of the "informatics of domination," "there are also great
riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilities
inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism
and machine" (174). For Haraway, the cyborg body defies identity
predicated on domination; the "infidel heteroglossia" of "cyborg
writing" enables a new and unstable vision of boundaries,
autonomy, and individuation. The proposition is compelling. Yet it
doesn't ring true for me. Kristeva argues that, unlike men, "women
have nothing to laugh about when the symbolic order collapses." It
seems to me that, indeed, there is little that is deeply humorous
or enabling for women in the solvent presence of the machine in
twentieth-century discourse. A new desperation inhabits
representation, a scramble to become cyborg, to enhance the self
with technological supplementation, and this hysterical desire
plays itself out--once more--on the matter/matrix/virgin plain
that is still perceived as feminine. The postmodern subject
continues to be (or--just as aptly--continues to fail to be)
established through gender violence even if generally disguised,
ironized, and/or apologized for. In fact, one might go so far as
to assert with Higgins and Silver that even in contemporary
figuration, "rape and rapability are central" to the construction
of gender identity and that "rape exists as a context" for
subjectivity (3).